FBI, Justice Department to defend counterterror efforts

CURT ANDERSONAssociated Press Writer

Published Tuesday, April 13, 2004

WASHINGTON -- The nation's top law enforcement officials say they recognized the threat posed by al-Qaida in the months leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, but members of the commission looking into the attacks say they want proof that concern equaled action.

The panel begins a new two-day hearing Tuesday with testimony from former FBI Director Louis Freeh, Attorney General John Ashcroft and former Attorney General Janet Reno. Thomas Pickard, who served as acting FBI director in the months just before the attacks, and former CIA counterterrorism center director Cofer Black also are scheduled to testify.

Aides to Ashcroft said he plans to rebut criticism that he was more focused on issues such as illegal drugs and gun crimes than terrorism before the attacks. They point to a May 9, 2001, Senate hearing in which Ashcroft testified his agency had "no higher priority" than protecting against terrorist attacks.

In an article in Monday's Wall Street Journal, Freeh said the FBI "relentlessly did its job pursuing terrorists" before the attacks but was hampered by lack of resources and political will.

Member Slade Gorton, a Republican, has said the FBI "has more questions to answer" than does Rice or former presidential terrorism adviser Richard Clarke, who has said the Bush administration did not take the terrorism threat as seriously as did the Clinton administration.

"There has been a lot of talk about whether there was urgency or lack of urgency. We really don't care about the names, we care about what actions were taken," commission member Jamie Gorelick, a Democrat who served under Reno as deputy attorney general, said on NBC's "Today" show. "There is a major game of finger-pointing going on here. Our job is to get to the bottom of it."

The hearing comes on the heels of the weekend release of a previously classified Aug. 6, 2001, intelligence memo that warned al-Qaida was operating in the United States and might be looking to hijack planes. The memo did not provide specific times or places for potential attacks.

President Bush, speaking Monday with reporters at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, repeated his view that the memo -- the president's daily brief, or PDB -- was "kind of a history" of Osama bin Laden's intentions but contained no warning that "something is about to happen in America."

"There was nothing in there that said, you know, 'There is an imminent attack,'" Bush said.

Still, citing statements by Rice, Bush said: "Now may be the time to revamp and reform our intelligence services."

Law enforcement officials say the FBI was doing all it could to identify and disrupt terrorists. For example, the FBI in 1999 made counterterrorism a separate division and created a unit to focus on bin Laden.

Freeh said it took the Sept. 11 attacks to make others see the danger posed by al-Qaida.

"The al-Qaida threat was the same on Sept. 10 and Sept. 12," he wrote. "Nothing focuses a government quicker than a war."

Freeh pointed out that the FBI expanded its overseas legal attache offices from 19 to 44 during his tenure, which ended three months before the attacks, and increased the prominence of joint terrorism task forces that included personnel from other agencies.

Freeh also said that at his first meeting with Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, four days after they took office, they discussed terrorism, al-Qaida and several recent overseas attacks targeting American interests.

But Freeh and Pickard, the interim FBI director in summer 2001, say there were budgetary constraints. For example, Freeh said, the FBI asked for 1,895 special agents, linguists and analysts for counterterrorism in fiscal 2000, 2001 and 2002 -- and wound up with just 76.

Still, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said in a letter Monday to current FBI Director Robert Mueller that total FBI spending rose some 132 percent from 1993 to 2003, with counterterrorism requests nearly always met or exceeded.

"Congress consistently granted the FBI huge amounts of money for its counterterrorism mission, often at levels more than the administration was requesting," said Grassley, a senior Judiciary Committee member and frequent FBI critic.

Mueller said in a written statement Monday that he was satisfied that Ashcroft and the Justice Department had "provided substantial support" to FBI budget requests since he took office in September 2001, including requests for counterterrorism funding.

"Attorney General Ashcroft and I have been in lockstep in ensuring that FBI resources are sufficient to prevent terrorism and fight crime," Mueller said.

Questions also surround what FBI investigators were doing during the summer of 2001, when intelligence reports indicated that bin Laden's organization was plotting a major attack. Those reports culminated in the Aug. 6 memo, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."

At the time, according to a congressional investigation into Sept. 11, the FBI's field offices had not made terrorism a top priority and there was only a single strategic analyst focused full-time on al-Qaida at FBI headquarters. Much of the FBI's attention was focused on investigating overseas attacks, such as the October 2000 strike on the USS Cole destroyer at port in Yemen.

The Aug. 6 memo cited 70 ongoing FBI field investigations into al-Qaida in the United States, which Bush administration officials say demonstrates how seriously the threats were being taken.

A senior FBI official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the number encompassed a range of different al-Qaida investigations -- not just suspected terror cells -- and none were ultimately tied to the 19 hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks.